A Catholic priest said Friday that he has been punished by church leaders in France after he gathered more than 100,000 signatures for a petition calling for a cardinal to resign over his handling of child sexual abuse cases.

A Ninth Circuit panel rebuked the County of San Diego Wednesday for taking a couple’s children away and subjecting them to invasive gynecological and rectal exams as part of a child abuse investigation.

Accusing the Milton Hershey School of barely disguising its sectarian activities, two former employees claim in a federal complaint that the philanthropic boarding school threatens its nonevangelical staff and students with “isolation, death, hell, and demonic possession.”

A British diver involved with the rescue of a Thai youth soccer team this summer sued Elon Musk on a defamation claim Monday over the Tesla Motors CEO’s accusations on social media that the diver is a pedophile.

Pope Francis is summoning the presidents of every bishops conference around the world for a February summit to discuss preventing clergy sex abuse and protecting children — evidence that he realizes the scandal is global and that inaction threatens to undermine his legacy.

On the heels of a grand jury report detailing 70 years of sexual-misconduct allegations involving six of the Pennsylvania’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses, New York launched a state probe Thursday into the church’s handling of abuse allegations.

A Southern California judge on Friday denied a request to separate perjury counts from the more serious accusations against a man who along with his wife face child abuse and torture charges involving their 13 children.

The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow” Thursday over a scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report about clergy who raped and molested children in six dioceses in that state, calling the abuse “criminally and morally reprehensible” and saying Pope Francis wants to eradicate “this tragic horror.”

Reflex Media accused five businesses in a federal complaint of setting up fake accounts on its Seeking Arrangement dating site to get personal information about users that they use to extort the men by threatening to post the information online with false claims of child predation.

A detailed lawsuit filed Thursday in New Jersey federal court claims the former headmaster of a prestigious Upper East Side private school sexually assaulted a Brooklyn teenager who was living with him in the 1980s and helping around the house in exchange for free tuition.

Claiming the youth organization was infiltrated by pedophiles, an Arkansas man filed a lawsuit saying the Boy Scouts allowed a scout leader accused of sexually assaulting boys in Georgia to relocate and abuse him several years later.

A mother says her little boy is “unable to see, walk, talk or eat,” and she was even suspected of child abuse, because a Washington hospital failed for months to diagnose his measles, despite showing classic symptoms of the disease, in Santa Clara County Court.

A 10th Circuit panel did not hide its disappointment Tuesday in granting qualified immunity to 14 Oklahoma social workers who repeatedly failed to protect 10 children from a shockingly abusive household that also contained dangerous pet monkeys.